Daily Report: Google Pixel and the New Long Game

Google has a new smartphone. More than buy it, you may want to watch its progress.

Brian X. Chen has spent some time with the phone, called the Pixel. His verdict: It’s an underwhelming phone with a lesser-quality camera, but with Samsung’s top-end products off-limits because of exploding batteries, it is a good new model for people using Android apps.

This is more than just a product review, though, because some of things Mr. Chen points to say much about the current tech scene, and how hard companies are fighting to make consumer products with unprecedented amounts of complex software and hardware. Short version: A successful company has to build a lot of things quickly, learn from them and adjust the products.

One thing about the phone, the first to carry the Google brand, that Mr. Chen likes is the way it connects to Project Fi, Google’s cheap, high-speed wireless service. Fi is just getting started, and Google is eager to see how its commercial device network functions.

One of the things that vexes Mr. Chen is the way Google Assistant, Google’s artificial intelligence-based personal aide, still fails to deliver on the promise of helping you manage your days. That is surprising, considering how long Google has used A.I. in other areas, but quality A.I. personalization requires its own stream of data. Google will get extra information by having its own phone.

Image

In both these good and bad aspects, the Pixel is working off a much larger ecosystem of Google endeavors, including the world’s largest private network of computers, and a global sales machine. It’s notable that Google’s own web page about the Pixel shows Assistant giving information about the weather in Mumbai.

This “be everywhere possible” urgency is, to some extent, playing out at several consumer companies, and all the companies are experiencing some shortfalls. Apple’s iPhone is a leader, but the company must worry that its heavy emphasis on consumer privacy and tight control of how the phone is used limit how much data it gets to improve A.I.

Amazon has repurposed its failed Fire phone into Echo, the smash home device, but isn’t getting much information about people on the go. Microsoft has no phone, but lots of search technology and some device information from its laptop, the Surface.

It’s telling, perhaps, that while Google remade itself as Alphabet over a year ago partly to ensure more accountability among divisions, the Pixel is part of Google, where there is ample cash from search ads.

Google has previously pulled out of misbegotten hardware ventures, like Glass or the Nexus Q. With the Pixel, or Google Home, its answer to the Echo, Google is likely to hang in far longer — watching, learning, adjusting and gathering ever more data on us.